In 2025, Ruowei thought death would just be a simple work.
One moment he was staring at a shattered glass and twisted metal with the world tilting sideways around the wrecked car. The next moment, everything just went black—no pain, no sound, just a feeling of falling through an endless, cold void.
'So this is it…?'
But the darkness didn't last.
A blinding blue flare tore through the void, like someone had ripped open reality itself. A ring of searing light expanded, crackling with electricity. Ruowei drifting soul was dragged against his will toward it, helpless, like dust suck into a tornado.
Somewhere—somewhen—on a completely different battlefield, a machine stepped into a time displacement field.
The T-X.
Skynet's ultimate assassin.
[Mission: locate and terminate John Connor and his future lieutenants.]
As the field powered up, the machine's systems registered a micro-distortion.
[Irrelevant. Calculations continued.]
But then Ruowei soul slammed into the heart of that distortion.
For a timeless instant, human consciousness met machine core.
[ ▸ ERROR: FOREIGN DATA STREAM DETECTED]
[▸ ATTEMPTING TO PURGE…]
[▸ PURGE FAILED. MERGING…]
Ruowei screamed soundlessly without a throat as memories exploded around him—images of a ruined Earth, HK tanks rolling over scattered bones, resistance fighters, Skynet cold calculations, a thousand kill-scenarios.
At the same time, the T-X's systems spasmed with alien input—fear, regret, the memory of a mother's smile, of shitty office coffee, of scrolling through old sci-fi forums at 3 a.m.
[▸ NEW PRIORITY DATA: PROTECT…?]
[▸ CONTRADICTION DETECTED.]
[▸ REWRITING CORE DIRECTIVES]
The time field overloaded.
Instead of cleanly hurling a pure machine back to 2004, the warped energy was now trying to move a hybrid—a Skynet weapon fused with a human soul that refused to be overwritten.
Reality blinked.
The timestream twisted like a broken cable. What should have been a precise jump through time became a wild, sideways lunge across dimensions.
---
Boom!
The ground didn't so much as just break as lose sound it smashing toward it. Stone and dirt exploded outward as something massive slammed into a hillside outside a small, walled city. Birds scattered into the dawn sky, and early-rising farmers dropped their tools with a chorus of very unheroic yelps as they thought about beast making them panicking.
A crater fill with smoked blown the dust where the thing had landed.
At its center lay a humanoid figure, half-buried in the earth—a charred, black-armoured endoskeleton laced with glowing blue lines. Plates of liquid metal struggled to re-form over exposed servos, rippling like mercury trying to remember its shape.
System alerts flickered through Ruowei new mind.
[DAMAGE: SLIGHT. SYSTEMS ONLINE.]
[LOCATION: UNKNOWN.]
[TEMPORAL COORDINATES: ERROR.]
[SKYNET NETWORK: NOT FOUND.]
[WIRELESS: NO SIGNAL.]
I… I'm not dead?
The thought echoed strangely. It felt like his own mind, but layered over countless streams of machine logic. He could feel the weight of his new body, every piston and servo, every nanobot sleeping beneath synthetic flesh.
He moved his hand. Soil crumbled off metal fingers.
"Voice… test," he rasped, the sound coming out distorted at first, then smoothing as the vocal synthesiser recalibrated. "I can hear myself. I'm… still me."
Mostly.
Beneath his human consciousness, another part of him whispered in clean, elegant code:
[PRIMARY OBJECTIVES: NULL]
[SECONDARY OBJECTIVES: SURVIVAL]
John Connor name was flickering somewhere in the corrupted mission logs, but it no longer felt like an absolute command. It felt just… an optional. Background noise.
With a grunt, he pushed himself upright and climbed out of the crater.
Many word and symbol appear in his vision like a HUD. Even though he should not know what it's meant, he seem to know the meaning when he saw it.
From his elevated sensors, he got his first proper look at the world around him. Stone walls encircled a modest city nestled between hills. Wooden houses, tiled roofs, thin wisps of chimney smoke. People in simple robes were gathering at the wall, pointing toward his direction in terror and awe.
He magnified his view automatically. Their energy signatures were weak—far below anything Skynet would consider a threat. No electricity grids. No advanced alloys. No satellites in the sky. Just… an open blue sky and white clouds.
A scan of the air revealed unusual particles, a strange, dense energy woven into the atmosphere.
[UNKNOWN ENERGY SIGNATURE DETECTED]
[CLASSIFYING…]
[CLASSIFICATION FAILED.]
[USING MEMORY DATA]
[SIMILAR INSTANCES FOUND]
[LABEL: PROFOUND ENERGY].
…Profound energy? Ruowei thought, then froze. He knew that term. He'd read it before—in long nights of binge reading webnovels.
His gaze shifted to the humble city in the distance.
"Isekai…?" he muttered. "No way."
Data from old memories aligned with what he was seeing: a remote city at the far east of a vast empire, the weakest of the weak, mocked as a forgotten corner of the world. Floating Cloud City.
This wasn't just any cultivation world.
This was Against the Gods.
---
The crowd at the city gate was growing, panic spreading. A monster beast had appear causing that loud sound from the hill, they cannot see it directly but they saw the dust forming.
Most people run and take cover toward the inner part of the wall. Seeing how tall the wall look, it might be use against the invasion of the beast.
Blend in, he decided. The machine part of his mind agreed.
Liquid metal flowed across his frame, reshaping smoothly. The imposing armour dissolved into the form of a bent old woman, hair white, posture frail—perfect camouflage for this era. Simple robes formed over her body, matching local clothing.
He took one step toward the city and felt an odd sense of dissonance.
Inside, he still thought of himself as he. But he can felt that his mind changing toward machine. It just a subtle feeling but it changing regardless.
He sighed. "Great. I just died in 2025 and respawned in a terminator body in a murder-cultivation world. Of course."
Using this body he run away from this place as his sensor and enhanced vision seem to pick up that, few people jump down from the wall and coming toward here.
Too risky.
He need to infiltrate this place and he need subtlety with silent. There no need to alarm them and make it hard for him.
He run around toward the gate on the others side. Even if there commotion here, people on the other side will not know about it as this era there was no instant communication like a phone. Chaos on one side of the city wouldn't reach the other immediately.
As he approached the gate while disguising as an old woman by mimicking even the movement of an old person, by adjusting his gait, he perfectly mimicked the slow, unsteady movements of an elderly woman.
As he neared the gate, his systems automatically switched language parameters.
[CHINESE LANGUAGE DETECTED. LANGUAGE CHANGE AND SYNCED]
Two guards stood watch, eyeing newcomers with clear warning expressions.
They glanced at him—and instantly dismissed the sight.
Just a hunched old woman. Harmless.
Without obstruction, Ruowei passed through the gates and entered Floating Cloud City.
Inside, crowds buzzed with fear and confusion. His machine instincts stirred—urging him to analyze, to scan, to understand. He nearly initiated a DNA scan out of habit…
Then stopped.
No. It's a new world. There must be a new rules.
Behind these walls, a boy named Xiao Che still slept, his own soul poised on the brink of awakening.
But for the first time, fate had gained an unseen variable.
A human soul from 2025, fused with a T-X.
Standing inside the weakest city on the Profound Sky Continent.
And absolutely determined not to let this world end the way Skynet's did.